The present invention relates to a storage apparatus capable of storing data, and more particularly to the storage apparatus capable of estimating power consumption and a method of estimating power consumption of the storage apparatus estimating power consumption.
There is known a so-called storage system in which a sub system is configured by a disk array including a plurality of hard disk drives and which stores data in the disk array.
The storage system includes host interfaces, disk interfaces, cache memories, processor units, and switch units connecting the host interfaces, the disk interfaces, the cache memories, and the processor units one another. The storage system is connected to host computers through the host interfaces and also connected to a disk array through the disk interfaces.
Functions of units in the storage system are as follows. That is, the host interfaces are used to connect the storage system to the host computers. The disk interfaces are used to connect the storage system to the disk array. The cache memories stores a part of data in the disk array so that the host computers can access the data faster. The switch units are used to connect the units of the storage system to each other. The processor units are used to control the unit of the storage system.
In such a storage system, a plurality of computers is connected. Accordingly, the storage system is used at a data center or the like under the environment in which many computers aggregate in many cases.
Meanwhile, power consumption of the data center and the computers at the data center has been increasing. In particular, since the power consumption of the storage system is large, it is required to save the power consumption in a way of controlling the power consumption of hard disks, reallocate the data among disks, or so on. In this case, it is necessary to precisely calculate the power consumption for each component in accordance with an operation state of the component.
A related technique is disclosed in JP-A-2007-079754. This document discloses a technique capable of measuring power consumption for every operating component to show the power consumption to a system manager in association with rated electric power, the number of I/O processes, traffic, and the like.
In addition, JP-A-2008-003719 discloses a technique in which a threshold value for electric power is set to the power consumption of hard disks, and the rotation frequency of the hard disks or the power of the hard disks is controlled to be turned on and off so that the electric power is kept equal to or less than the threshold value.
In “Modeling Hard-Disk Power Consumption” of Proceedings of 2nd USENIX Conference on File And Storage Technologies in 2003, there is disclosed a method of estimating power consumption by executing a detailed state simulation (simulation of state transition of seek, cue standby, access, and the like from I/O trace) in compact hard disk drives used in laptop computers or the like. In addition, as a simple method, there is disclosed a method of estimating power consumption by using a ratio of an operation time.